MediaPost Publications - Pheedo Unveils New Ad Unit - 02/14/2007: "Pheedo Unveils New Ad Unit
Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007 6:00 AM ET
RSS MARKETING FIRM PHEEDO HAS launched a new ad unit that allows publishers to syndicate their RSS feeds onto sites they sponsor. The ad units include articles--text or video--from the publisher's feed, as well as links that allow users to subscribe to the feeds directly from the ad unit. Advertisers using the service include Web browser Opera, women's health site Life Script, as well as clients in the automotive and travel spaces. "
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Rules of Social Media Optimization
Rules of Social Media Optimization
August 13th, 2006 Category: Search Strategy, Social Media
Rohit the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations has written an excellent piece called 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). For those involved with the web, we know this is quickly becoming a very important area (as social sites are dominating the web landscape).
Rohit’s Five Suggestions for Social Media Optimzation (SMO)Read his post to see all details
1) Increase your linkability
2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3) Reward inbound links
4) Help your content travel
5) Encourage the mashup
6) Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help youAdd value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitiors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding. How will this help SMO? Folks will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space. As this adds up, it will become more and more relevent in search engine results.
7) Reward helpful and valuable usersOften helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them buy promoting their works on the homepage, or develope a rating system. Sometimes a quick email or note in private telling them you appreciate them can go a long way. Some folks have done that to me, and for communities I run, I do that as well. Only do if sincere. Perhaps this is not truly SMO, but it will help to keep the most valuable members of a community closer to your site.
August 13th, 2006 Category: Search Strategy, Social Media
Rohit the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations has written an excellent piece called 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). For those involved with the web, we know this is quickly becoming a very important area (as social sites are dominating the web landscape).
Rohit’s Five Suggestions for Social Media Optimzation (SMO)Read his post to see all details
1) Increase your linkability
2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3) Reward inbound links
4) Help your content travel
5) Encourage the mashup
6) Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help youAdd value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitiors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding. How will this help SMO? Folks will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space. As this adds up, it will become more and more relevent in search engine results.
7) Reward helpful and valuable usersOften helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them buy promoting their works on the homepage, or develope a rating system. Sometimes a quick email or note in private telling them you appreciate them can go a long way. Some folks have done that to me, and for communities I run, I do that as well. Only do if sincere. Perhaps this is not truly SMO, but it will help to keep the most valuable members of a community closer to your site.
Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
August 16th, 2006 by Loren Baker, Editor 2 Comments
Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Cameron Olthuis at Pronet Advertising has a nice write up on optimizing for social media, dubbed Social Media Optimization (SMO) by Rohit Bhargava.
The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
There has been some cross blogging back and forth between Rohit, Cameron, and Jeremiah Owyang on the rules of Social Media Optimization, and I’ll add a couple more.
Here’s a summary of what they’ve put together to date:
1. Increase your linkability : Think blogs, content, aggregation & linkbait.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy : Include calls to action for users to tag, bookmark and Digg your stuff. I’d suggest the Sociable Plugin if you have a Wordpress powered blog.
3. Reward inbound links : List blogs which link back to you via permalinks, trackbacks or recently linking blogs (like the Yahoo & Google blogs do).
4. Help your content travel : Content diversification can lead to mobility of your content beyond the browser.
5. Encourage the mashup : Let others use your content or tools to produce something a bit different or outside of the box with your stuff, even RSS.
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you : Add value and outbound links, even if it doesn’t help in the short term, it will in the long.
7. Reward helpful and valuable users : Give your contributors and readers the recognition they deserve.
8. Participate : Get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others, and do it organically. Earn your rep on Digg.com, don’t try and force it.
9. Know how to target your audience : Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.
10. Create content : A little bit of rules 1 & 4 here, but the underlying message is know the form of content working for you.
11. Be real : Transparency pays off and no one likes a fake.
And mine:
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble : Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away being a BlogStar or industry talking head. Remember those who helped you along the way, and that respect will help all involved.
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh : Social Media is changing and morphing by the minute, keep up on new tools, products and challenges in your social sphere.
August 16th, 2006 by Loren Baker, Editor 2 Comments
Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Cameron Olthuis at Pronet Advertising has a nice write up on optimizing for social media, dubbed Social Media Optimization (SMO) by Rohit Bhargava.
The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
There has been some cross blogging back and forth between Rohit, Cameron, and Jeremiah Owyang on the rules of Social Media Optimization, and I’ll add a couple more.
Here’s a summary of what they’ve put together to date:
1. Increase your linkability : Think blogs, content, aggregation & linkbait.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy : Include calls to action for users to tag, bookmark and Digg your stuff. I’d suggest the Sociable Plugin if you have a Wordpress powered blog.
3. Reward inbound links : List blogs which link back to you via permalinks, trackbacks or recently linking blogs (like the Yahoo & Google blogs do).
4. Help your content travel : Content diversification can lead to mobility of your content beyond the browser.
5. Encourage the mashup : Let others use your content or tools to produce something a bit different or outside of the box with your stuff, even RSS.
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you : Add value and outbound links, even if it doesn’t help in the short term, it will in the long.
7. Reward helpful and valuable users : Give your contributors and readers the recognition they deserve.
8. Participate : Get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others, and do it organically. Earn your rep on Digg.com, don’t try and force it.
9. Know how to target your audience : Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.
10. Create content : A little bit of rules 1 & 4 here, but the underlying message is know the form of content working for you.
11. Be real : Transparency pays off and no one likes a fake.
And mine:
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble : Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away being a BlogStar or industry talking head. Remember those who helped you along the way, and that respect will help all involved.
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh : Social Media is changing and morphing by the minute, keep up on new tools, products and challenges in your social sphere.
5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)
5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Add to: blinklist del.cio.us digg yahoo! furl rawsugar shadows netvouz
For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website:
Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.
There are many other "rules" and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking. Perhaps we may even see the rise of entire groups or agencies devoted to SMO in the future ...
Add to: blinklist del.cio.us digg yahoo! furl rawsugar shadows netvouz
For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website:
Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.
There are many other "rules" and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking. Perhaps we may even see the rise of entire groups or agencies devoted to SMO in the future ...
The Ad-Free Cellphone May Soon Be Extinct
ADVERTISING on your cellphone?
Yes, and soon.
Already, ads are creeping onto cellphones around the globe. At this rate, experts say, it will not be long before the 2.2 billion mobile phone users around the world consider it natural to tune into a 15-second spot before watching a video, sending a message or listening to a downloaded song between phone conversations.
Or so they hope.
“This is the year that advertising breaks out worldwide,” said Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, based in Boulder, Colo., which represents more than 400 advertisers, phone makers, wireless operators and market research companies. “Previously, there were not enough of the right phones and fast networks to support good advertising.”
Ms. Marriott spoke yesterday in Barcelona, Spain, where 60,000 people are gathered this week for the 3GSM World Congress, the cellphone industry’s main event of the year. Several companies at the exposition are promising to meld advertising with the mobile phone in a way that respects people’s privacy while bringing in new revenue to offset sagging growth in voice services for phone carriers.
Yahoo, for instance, began displaying ads Sunday on sites accessible to subscribers with advanced cellphones in 19 countries. Mobile phone users with data as well as voice subscriptions would see the ads when going to Yahoo’s home Web page on their phones. They could then click on an ad to dial a company directly or to get more information and special offers.
The advertisers that Yahoo has signed up include Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Hilton, Nissan, Singapore Airlines and Intel, and the 19 countries include the United States, Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and India.
By the time such advertising becomes a mass-market phenomenon, most people in countries with developed economies will have advanced phones that can browse the Internet and play video, according to Nick Lane, an analyst with Informa Telecoms and Media, based in London.
•
The very nature of the mobile phone gives operators information about their customers that Internet and television advertisers can only dream of having.
Carriers know not just where their clients live, but where they are at the moment the ad is seen, how much they spend on phone services, whom they call and when, their age and sex, what games and music they play on their phones — and how to bill them.
People in the industry say they know that the personalized nature of cellphones is a double-edged sword: it is what makes the medium appealing to advertisers, but many people consider the medium too personal to be invaded by outside interests.
Some executives warned that success was not guaranteed, especially because the industry lacks common technical standards that would make it easy for advertisers to sell to many operators at once.
“The mobile phone can reach everybody and it’s always on, but we need to rapidly define our industry standards to be able to benefit from this opportunity,” Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone, said in a speech yesterday in Barcelona. Vodafone is the largest mobile phone operator by revenue.
“If we don’t work together, our suppliers will see a fragmented medium and a fragmented user base, as opposed to a single, valuable medium,” Mr. Sarin said. “We need to seize the moment and work together to help ads move to mobile. It won’t happen well if Vodafone does it differently than Orange and T-Mobile.”
The United States members of the Mobile Marketing Association — which include Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA and others — have agreed to guidelines that would limit advertising to those phone customers who “opt in,” or choose to receive the ads, usually in return for cheaper or free services. The organization is completing guidelines for the European market.
“Privacy is a big issue, and that has to be solved for mobile advertising to be successful,” Ms. Marriott said. “I don’t think people will opt in 24/7, but maybe they will opt in for certain times of day and for certain types of advertising.”
A recent report from Informa forecast that the market for mobile advertising will rise to $11.3 billion in 2011 from almost nothing just two years ago. It is too early to tell whether one type of advertising will be dominant in developed countries because the market is still in its nascent phase, though banner ads and short video spots are sure to be big, Mr. Lane said. Text-message ads will dominate in developing countries, he said.
•
Lowering the costs to consumers is especially appealing to the companies that produce media content for mobile phones.
“If you can get something for half-price or for free if there is a bit of advertising, and that can be done in a noninvasive manner, that’s compelling,” said Chadd Knowlton, general manager of the content access and protection division of Microsoft. “We’ll continue to see richer and better mobile advertising across all kinds of content.”
Patrick Parodi, chief marketing officer of Amobee Media Systems, which helps carriers bring advertising to their clients and showcased a new service at the Barcelona event, said reducing consumer media costs was an important outcome.
“Mobile is the last remaining medium where the user has to bear the entire cost of the content,” he said, “and that risks stunting the growth of many new and innovative mobile services that clients might be willing to access if the costs were lower.”
While the Mobile Marketing Association and other industry groups are laying down some ground rules, other basics are still being ironed out, including how best to deliver the ads. Analysts said to expect companies to introduce various styles of advertising, with possible methods including banners, text messages and multimedia messages, as well as video spots before, during or after a clip.
“The mobile phone is a pristine media,” Mr. Parodi said, “and we have to be sure not to ruin that.”
The Next Big Ad Medium: Podcasts
Advertisers will spend more than $400 million on podcasting by 2011, but they're still not sure who will be listening to them
by Catherine Holahan
Remember podcasting? While marketers have been busy uploading commercials to YouTube, the once-buzzed-about medium has spent the past two years building its audience and enhancing advertising capability. Now, podcasts are finally poised to grab a larger slice of the multibillion-dollar online advertising pie.
Research firm eMarketer expects that advertisers will spend more than $400 million on podcasting by 2011, up from $80 million last year, according to a report scheduled for release later this week. Fueling the anticipated growth is the expected entrance of Google (GOOG) into the podcasting arena, as well as new podcasting services focused on answering advertisers' most pressing questions: How many people are tuning in to the hundreds of thousands of online podcasts, and who are they?
Report author James Belcher expects that the Mountain View (Calif.) company will develop the ability to insert audio ads, based on keywords, into audio podcasts within the next five years. The online advertising goliath has been quiet about any plans to do so. However, Google extended its reach into audio marketing with the acquisition of radio advertising company dMarc last year (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/17/06, "Today Search, Tomorrow Ads?"). "One of the things coming down the pike is Google will develop some version of AdSense for podcasts," says Belcher.
Reaching Listeners
The medium isn't waiting for Google, however. On Feb. 14, podcast company Podtrac unveiled a free online service that enables advertisers to research audience information for audio and video podcasts based on demographics, size, and other characteristics. The company, which helps connect roughly 5,000 of the top podcasters to advertisers, includes data for all podcasts in its new service, including those from major media companies with whom Podtrac is not affiliated. It indexes its data to information in Mediamark Research's Survey of the American Consumer.
The hope, explains Podtrac chief executive and co-founder Mark McCrery, is that the service will give advertisers enough data to become comfortable with the new medium. "We want to grow the market for podcast advertising," says McCrery, adding that advertisers want the same information they get from traditional media when buying ads online.
Belcher credits such technology with helping solve one of the major problems podcasters have faced with advertisers: an inability to prove they have the size or type of audience they claim. It's a problem that Jonathan Cobb knows well. As the CEO and founder of Kiptronic, a startup that places ads within audio and video podcasts, Cobb says marketers have been skittish about advertising on a digital medium that, though it reports downloads, can't always charge based on the number of people who interact with the ad. "There is no way for somebody who is jogging and listening to a podcast at the gym to click on an ad," Cobb notes.
He points out that television and radio do not provide click-through rates either. But advertisers have grown to trust—or at least accept—data from third-party auditors. Cobb believes they are just beginning to trust podcast companies' internal data, taken from surveys. Kiptronic, for example, can tell advertisers generally where computers that downloaded audio or video files are located.
Finding That Niche
The entry of major media companies into podcasting has encouraged advertisers to embrace the medium, says Bob Fogarty, vice-president of sales and business development at PodZinger, an audio- and video-search engine that also sells advertising on podcasts. "When you see major players like Clear Channel (CCU) and CBS Radio (CBS) and personality types like Rush Limbaugh have adopted podcasting, you realize it has sort of crossed over into the mainstream," says Fogarty.
The increase of video podcasts, which lend themselves to the kind of video ads that marketers are accustomed to developing for television, has also increased advertiser interest. Also expected to entice advertisers is the highly targeted audience of many podcasts, says Belcher. For example, there are podcasts for people interested in consumer electronics, skateboarding, and comic books. "You can really serve a niche much better than traditional television," says David Prager, chief operating officer and VP of programming at Revision3, an online television network that shows video podcasts. Its most popular, Diggnation, is viewed 250,000 times per week, Prager says.
The more targeted the audience, the more likely advertisers can reach a consumer willing to buy their product. And in theory, that increased targeting will at some point lead to higher-priced advertising.
by Catherine Holahan
Remember podcasting? While marketers have been busy uploading commercials to YouTube, the once-buzzed-about medium has spent the past two years building its audience and enhancing advertising capability. Now, podcasts are finally poised to grab a larger slice of the multibillion-dollar online advertising pie.
Research firm eMarketer expects that advertisers will spend more than $400 million on podcasting by 2011, up from $80 million last year, according to a report scheduled for release later this week. Fueling the anticipated growth is the expected entrance of Google (GOOG) into the podcasting arena, as well as new podcasting services focused on answering advertisers' most pressing questions: How many people are tuning in to the hundreds of thousands of online podcasts, and who are they?
Report author James Belcher expects that the Mountain View (Calif.) company will develop the ability to insert audio ads, based on keywords, into audio podcasts within the next five years. The online advertising goliath has been quiet about any plans to do so. However, Google extended its reach into audio marketing with the acquisition of radio advertising company dMarc last year (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/17/06, "Today Search, Tomorrow Ads?"). "One of the things coming down the pike is Google will develop some version of AdSense for podcasts," says Belcher.
Reaching Listeners
The medium isn't waiting for Google, however. On Feb. 14, podcast company Podtrac unveiled a free online service that enables advertisers to research audience information for audio and video podcasts based on demographics, size, and other characteristics. The company, which helps connect roughly 5,000 of the top podcasters to advertisers, includes data for all podcasts in its new service, including those from major media companies with whom Podtrac is not affiliated. It indexes its data to information in Mediamark Research's Survey of the American Consumer.
The hope, explains Podtrac chief executive and co-founder Mark McCrery, is that the service will give advertisers enough data to become comfortable with the new medium. "We want to grow the market for podcast advertising," says McCrery, adding that advertisers want the same information they get from traditional media when buying ads online.
Belcher credits such technology with helping solve one of the major problems podcasters have faced with advertisers: an inability to prove they have the size or type of audience they claim. It's a problem that Jonathan Cobb knows well. As the CEO and founder of Kiptronic, a startup that places ads within audio and video podcasts, Cobb says marketers have been skittish about advertising on a digital medium that, though it reports downloads, can't always charge based on the number of people who interact with the ad. "There is no way for somebody who is jogging and listening to a podcast at the gym to click on an ad," Cobb notes.
He points out that television and radio do not provide click-through rates either. But advertisers have grown to trust—or at least accept—data from third-party auditors. Cobb believes they are just beginning to trust podcast companies' internal data, taken from surveys. Kiptronic, for example, can tell advertisers generally where computers that downloaded audio or video files are located.
Finding That Niche
The entry of major media companies into podcasting has encouraged advertisers to embrace the medium, says Bob Fogarty, vice-president of sales and business development at PodZinger, an audio- and video-search engine that also sells advertising on podcasts. "When you see major players like Clear Channel (CCU) and CBS Radio (CBS) and personality types like Rush Limbaugh have adopted podcasting, you realize it has sort of crossed over into the mainstream," says Fogarty.
The increase of video podcasts, which lend themselves to the kind of video ads that marketers are accustomed to developing for television, has also increased advertiser interest. Also expected to entice advertisers is the highly targeted audience of many podcasts, says Belcher. For example, there are podcasts for people interested in consumer electronics, skateboarding, and comic books. "You can really serve a niche much better than traditional television," says David Prager, chief operating officer and VP of programming at Revision3, an online television network that shows video podcasts. Its most popular, Diggnation, is viewed 250,000 times per week, Prager says.
The more targeted the audience, the more likely advertisers can reach a consumer willing to buy their product. And in theory, that increased targeting will at some point lead to higher-priced advertising.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Podcasting to Generate $400 Mil. in Ads by 2011
Mike Shields
FEBRUARY 12, 2007 -
Podcasting, the hot new media darling before YouTube mania swept in, is poised for a major growth spurt in ad dollars, despite the fact that the young medium’s usage has failed to match the recent proliferation of Apple’s iPod and other MP3-playing devices.
That’s according to a report to be released by eMarketer this week, which finds that spending on podcasting advertising will quintuple over the next five years, from a paltry $80 million base in 2006 to a $400 million market in 2011. (Granted, this is still on the small side, considering the $20 billion interactive ad market expected this year.)
eMarketer analyst James Belcher is betting that a familiar Web power player will spark much of that growth: Google.
Belcher expects that by 2008, the 800-pound algorithm gorilla will develop a version of AdSense that can be easily adapted to podcasts, theoretically allowing any Joe Schmoe podcaster to implement advertising. “That should help grow the market,” he said.
Currently, despite some 90,000 podcasts available on the Web and close to 90 million iPods in the market, podcasting is universally thought of as a supplemental medium by advertisers. That’s because “the percentage of people who use podcasts regularly remains pretty low,” Belcher said. Just 12 percent of Americans report having ever consumed a podcast, according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and just 1 percent do so regularly, which translates to roughly 3 million people. “I’m not convinced that it’s going to grow so rapidly,” Belcher noted.
Despite the small base of users, podcasting represents an attractive medium, given its targeting, its low cost and its obsessive/passionate user base, says the report. “These people constitute an excellent media target,” Belcher said. “It’s a self-selecting medium. These people are into it, and they’re really into it.”
And while Google would likely bring in many smaller advertisers to podcasting, several major brands have jumped into the medium. “We’re seeing steady growth,” said Mark McCrery, founder and CEO of Podtrac, a startup company that is building a podcasting network while also working to establish some measurement standards. Podtrac has run podcast campaigns for Warner Bros., Paramount, Dell, T-Mobile, HBO, Honda and others, with most coming in the second half of last year. “They are investing in podcast advertising, getting some good learning and coming back for more.”
That’s despite a common complaint among buyers and sellers that it’s very difficult to measure exactly how many people actually listen to or view individual podcasts right now. “It’s very unlike the Web in a way,” said Ira Becker, senior vp and general manager of the 1UP Network, a division of Ziff Davis which has produced 63 episodes (and counting) of The 1UP Show, a gaming-themed video podcast. “It’s a vanity buy right now,” explained Becker. “Advertisers are asking for it as part of multiplatform buy.”
FEBRUARY 12, 2007 -
Podcasting, the hot new media darling before YouTube mania swept in, is poised for a major growth spurt in ad dollars, despite the fact that the young medium’s usage has failed to match the recent proliferation of Apple’s iPod and other MP3-playing devices.
That’s according to a report to be released by eMarketer this week, which finds that spending on podcasting advertising will quintuple over the next five years, from a paltry $80 million base in 2006 to a $400 million market in 2011. (Granted, this is still on the small side, considering the $20 billion interactive ad market expected this year.)
eMarketer analyst James Belcher is betting that a familiar Web power player will spark much of that growth: Google.
Belcher expects that by 2008, the 800-pound algorithm gorilla will develop a version of AdSense that can be easily adapted to podcasts, theoretically allowing any Joe Schmoe podcaster to implement advertising. “That should help grow the market,” he said.
Currently, despite some 90,000 podcasts available on the Web and close to 90 million iPods in the market, podcasting is universally thought of as a supplemental medium by advertisers. That’s because “the percentage of people who use podcasts regularly remains pretty low,” Belcher said. Just 12 percent of Americans report having ever consumed a podcast, according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and just 1 percent do so regularly, which translates to roughly 3 million people. “I’m not convinced that it’s going to grow so rapidly,” Belcher noted.
Despite the small base of users, podcasting represents an attractive medium, given its targeting, its low cost and its obsessive/passionate user base, says the report. “These people constitute an excellent media target,” Belcher said. “It’s a self-selecting medium. These people are into it, and they’re really into it.”
And while Google would likely bring in many smaller advertisers to podcasting, several major brands have jumped into the medium. “We’re seeing steady growth,” said Mark McCrery, founder and CEO of Podtrac, a startup company that is building a podcasting network while also working to establish some measurement standards. Podtrac has run podcast campaigns for Warner Bros., Paramount, Dell, T-Mobile, HBO, Honda and others, with most coming in the second half of last year. “They are investing in podcast advertising, getting some good learning and coming back for more.”
That’s despite a common complaint among buyers and sellers that it’s very difficult to measure exactly how many people actually listen to or view individual podcasts right now. “It’s very unlike the Web in a way,” said Ira Becker, senior vp and general manager of the 1UP Network, a division of Ziff Davis which has produced 63 episodes (and counting) of The 1UP Show, a gaming-themed video podcast. “It’s a vanity buy right now,” explained Becker. “Advertisers are asking for it as part of multiplatform buy.”
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